Mozilla Labs has introduced its concept of a desktop replacement called Webian Shell. The Webian Shell basically consists of a browser which will replace the traditional desktop, and where the web applications are given more importance than the native applications.

Why are so many people obsessed with using the web for everything? I write web apps for a living, I spend my days swimming in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I even defended web apps the other day in another comment. But let's face it, from a developer standpoint, it's a crappy platform!

Why are so many people obsessed with using the web for everything? I write web apps for a living, I spend my days swimming in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I even defended web apps the other day in another comment. But let's face it, from a developer standpoint, it's a crappy platform!

In the IT world there is a pendulum where technology embracing swings from one extreme to another and then settles somewhere in the middle. Take Flash when it was first released, it was used and misused with horrible splash screens, over the top animations which then resulted in a backlash against Flash but now we're moving into the phase where, "Flash is ok if you don't abuse it. Use it where you need to but don't over use it". Same for manage code, it was vilified then it was over embraced then the market moved its way back to the middle where there is a happy medium between managed and yet giving developers the power if they want to step out of the sandbox.

In the case of Microsoft, they're already late to the party - Apple and WebOS (Palm) already went through the 'Web Apps rule the world" when they were first launched but now both have realised that web apps have their place but people still want native applications. Microsoft is still stuck in that first phase, they think that web apps will rule the world but hopefully by the time Windows 8 is launched they would have moved beyond that and realised that 'Web Technologies' aren't the swiss army knife for multi-platform development.

I think a HTML/XUL combination for the UI and JS for the logic behind it is pretty great, because it's easy to pick up and is high level enough so we don't have to worry about things like memory allocation and strong and static typing like we did 30 years ago. We've come far enough that we shouldn't have to fiddle with such arcane concepts. Instead we can focus on what's really important: being creative and getting more stuff done in the same amount of time.

On the flipside, I'm not really convinced that the current JS implementations are suitable for desktop applications. Someone should first make a proper JS compiler.